Cannot unsee

[lizbee]

This week, at the behest of suburbannoir, I started watching Breaking Bad.  (We have a thing where I watch one of her favourite shows, she watches one of mine, etc.  Last year I watched The Wire for her, and she watched Babylon 5 for me.  SHUT UP, THEY ARE TOTALLY COMPARABLE.)

Anyway, I'm only four episodes in, but it's the internet, I've seen pictures from future seasons and whatnot, and I already know that Skyler is the very worst character in the history of storytelling (on account of how she's a woman, and has opinions, and expects to be treated with respect, as far as I can tell), and according to The Guardian, the whole show shamefully appropriates the drug culture of people of colour (and only PoC) and turns it into a white middle class fantasy, and worse, isn't even an accurate depiction of the meth industry! 

(Which I can vouch for.  I've transcribed cases involving meth cooks and users, and either way, the transcript tends to come out looking like this:

SUSPECT:   ...(INAUDIBLE)... fuckin' ...(INAUDIBLE)... cuntin' ...(INAUDIBLE)... fuck - - -

And let me tell you, I am SHOCKED and APPALLED that television, of all media, would enhance the truth.)

The actual point, however, of this post is this:

Yep. Good luck getting that one out of your head!  And don't do meth.  It's legit nasty.

Comments

[attackfish]

*Tries hard not to laugh at the idea that drug culture is entirely a POC thing that white middle class people have no involvement with, given that I'm a white middle class girl with addicts all over my family.*

The thing that kills me about Breaking Bad is that I'm from Albuquerque, and I was much much closer to the drug culture there then I would have liked. Yeah, meth exists there, and it's a problem, but not more than anywhere else, and the drug everybody worries about is heroin. Heroin is a huge deal in Albuquerque because the major town for the cartels to bring it up from Mexico and then distribute it from is right near by, and we're the nearest city. It's dead cheep, and it's everywhere. Between Breaking Bad and In Plain Sight (which I love) and their whole storyline with Mary's sister being involved with the meth dealer, everybody thinks Albuquerque=meth, which given that we have a horrible, horrible drug problem, and it's not meth, is kind of sickly ironic. Also, I couldn't believe the sister and the meth dealer storyline. I would have had a much easier time buying it if she were smuggling heroin instead.

[lizbee]

I didn't know that! In Australia, at least, there's a lot of flailing about meth because it's so easy to manufacture, whereas heroin has to be imported. So meth is dead cheap here, by drug standards.

[prof_pangaea]

meth is dead cheap throughout most of the US, because of its ease of manufacture (and the southwest is definitely brimming with it, although i'm not sure where the meth capital of the country is at the moment). not to speak for attackfish, but i gathered than heroin is unusually cheap in albuquerque because it's so close to an important distribution point, not that it's universally about the same price as meth across the country. i mean, i would assume not, my mom had to pawn a lot of jewelry to support her heroin habit, and that was 13 years ago.

[attackfish]

Yes, exactly. Heroin is extremely cheep in Albuquerque not in the US as a whole. Price has come down in the last few years, since the Taliban lost their total control over Afghanistan (Whatever else they did, they kept Afghanistan out of opium production) but it's not a cheep drug. Except in Albuquerque. The city is also crawling with heroin distributors.

Actually, the ease of manufacture is why I couldn't buy Mary's sister smuggling meth to New Jersey like I could heroin. Meth can be made anywhere. There's no reason to lug it cross country. Heroin can't.